Electric vehicles and alternate fuel sources

Love this "My experts are better than your experts" stuff.

Great way to shut down a conversation.

Lots of interesting info on this thread. It is pretty important because that is where we are heading and with anything new there will always be zealots and no-change people each pushing their barrow - not by lying but selective use of the facts. So long as we keep the conversation going we might find some answers in the middle ground. No need to get irate.

Lang

The more invested your interest in any new idea/device the more energy you will invest in it.

Me, I don't care about Electric cars one way or the other.

But I do expect them to pay their way.

Maybe they should make an invested contribution to the cost of our roads.

Yeah I think you might be confusing some costs.

Registration is what state governments charge for using the road and heavy vehicles get stung for more.

Fuel tax is collected by the feds and disappears into general revenue... If all that money was spent on roads we'd actually have good ones.

It'll be interesting to see how the Covid shutdown affects fuel tax revenue. When a lot of people realise they don't actually need to commute to work...

Even though our fuel is fairly sh!tty, the feds are quietly loosening fuel standards even more, in an effort to subsidise the poor old oil companies through the crisis.

They're even gifting the yanks $90 million+ for a fuel reserve that will be useless to us if shipping is shut down.

If we invested in some electric cars we wouldn't need to ship or buy foreign oil. How is that not winning at everything?

We're blessed with some of the world's best solar conditions, so my wife does a lot of her hybrid grocery getting for free... even at night it's 1/6 the cost of petrol... and more than half the electricity is renewable in SA now so there's not much gas & barely a sliver of Victorian brown coal invested in it either.

You don't need to be a zealot to realise my old cruiser with a ton of tools isn't going to be electric soon, but most car journeys in Australia are under 20km... 90% of us live within half an hour of the coast... we don't need 1000km range... we just need to get on with it.

Cheers

Invested, don't know that your facts about SA energy are exactly correct. As at 20.20 this evening, well over half of SA electricity was being generated by natural gas and continues to be so. (Source. SA Govt web site). It may vary during the day but facts are facts.

Perhaps not quite, perhaps over 50% of what SA is generating is from gas, but 50% of the state demand is being met from Vic and Tas PS> EDITED to add, at the time I made the post, this will of course change minute by minute.

Invested: earlier you said "Everywhere you have a street light or a service fuse there is a point that can easily be wired for car charging." True, indisputable, but how long do you think it might take? Photo of the charging station at the Euroa motel shows a 50 kva charging station - that is serious power stuff, not a street light nor a service fuse! Not even a full household supply!

Yeah generation varies of course, so does demand. As of 11am today SA was 100% renewable with negative spot prices.

Yellow is solar.
Green is wind.
Orange & Tan is gas, (which they're obliged to keep burning just in case)
Purple is Victorian import.


We need some pumped hydro if they just hurry up with Cultana that'll help.

opennem.org.au/energy/sa1/

I'm not familiar with your app Allan but I find these interesting...

For live demand :

www.nem-watch.info/widgets/reneweconomy/



For detail that you can customise for days/weeks/months/years :

opennem.org.au/energy/sa1/

This screen shot goes back to 2006. You can see the growth in green & yellow renewables, as well as the abrupt end to brown coal. Pt Augusta is glad that's gone. It also shows the purple Victorians being driven out...

SA used to import electricity all the time from Victoria, like NSW continually relies on its neighbours for about 10% of its consumption.

That's all changed now, we export more electricity than we import and that'll grow once the interconnect to NSW is completed.

(side rant, the last time the Libs were in power in SA they privatised ETSA so all the profits are funneled off to Singapore via the tax free Bahamas. In the process they actually -cancelled- the NSW connection. We could all have had had had cheaper power for the last 15 years, except they wanted to sell an uncompetitive asset, for more money up front. If that's not treason I don't know what is)

The snapshot that I posted is direct from the NEM website !

I think charging will come quicker than anyone commonly thinks... uptake wise. It happened with solar PV on house roofs.

I mean 10 years ago solar was 10 time the price at least. Think about when you probably had a green screen Nokia, did anyone predict you'd now have a video camera, TV, order you dinner, rego your car, remote control your air con... with a phone? 10 years ago basically no one had a smart phone and the phone industry prediction on uptake was out by about THREE zeroes.

Anyway 50kVa gen sets are for fast charging... your big Tesla car packs are 100kWh animals so they'll use 70amps per phase... more than the 63a nominal household service most places have... but fast charging isn't going to be the norm.

Look at your phone, you can't just swap batteries in 30 seconds or fill it up in 2 minutes, you habitually plug it in overnight... and it will often have a program that "cares" for the battery by pausing at 80% and only topping it off in the hour before you get out of bed.

So when my wife gets home with the hybrid wagon, it gets plugged in and the little 12kWh pack takes 4 or 5 hours to charge? Easily done with a 10a power point. A bit quicker with the 15a one. 4 years degradation and it'll do a real world 25km trip with the air con on easily enough...

Things like a Nissan Leaf, with a 40kWh pack will be easy enough to cope with at a street light, they've normally got 16mm2 cable just like your house does.

The speed at which you charge, or when, will probably have more to do with price. Program your preference for a full tank at all times, or a certain amount of range say, then decide how much you're willing to pay...

When the spot price goes negative at 11am like it did today, you could be paid to soak it up. Go home and use that energy to cook dinner instead of buying energy when the price climbs at sunset/evening peak?

This is what the new smart grid will look like. Your car, hot water service, air con etc will have an internet connection and a price signal, that way we don't have to gold plate the network and overspend on generators that sit idle for most of the year. The term "baseload" becomes pretty much irrelevant, aside from perhaps an aluminium smelter, because we'll no longer have massive steam turbine thermal plants that have to be kept running to make them efficient.

It's an interesting time to live... and I take an interest because the luddites & naysayers get their view affirmed by misinformation from Andrew Bolt/Jo Nova/Alan Jones.

There's actually a lot of good news to be heard but unless it's a disaster they won't sell newspapers or clicks telling us...

In 2016 they had a massive storm take out a big chunk of transmission network and a 9 hour system black in SA. The sky fell in according to the right wing nutters.

Fast forward to this year and the very same thing happens to a bigger piece of network in Victoria. SA gets islanded from the rest of the country and has to run Portland Aluminium smelter as well... but the lights stayed on so there was nothing doing in the newspaper about it, which is a shame because people generally like hearing when something goes right.

reneweconomy.com.au/wind-and-batteries-s...OWOCHXKMPinR-8hjUytU